How Not to Write a Novel

This is a blatant attempt to distract you all from the measurements I posted in my last update.

I've been working on a novel for a while now.  The basic story is the origins of the narrator in "Lennon's Glasses," although the novel actually revolves around the Bloomsbury Group, featuring Virginia Woolf and her crowd.  I have started the first chapter a couple of times, but each time I make it through the first scene and then get totally stuck on what should happen next.  So I decided that I am the sort of writer who needs to work from a pretty extensive outline. Like many writers, I have a ton of writing books in my personal library, so I've been working my way through all the ones that address plot planning to try to find a model that would work well for me.

I'd narrowed it down to three:

1. Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass
2. First Draft in 30 Days by Karen Wiesner
3. The Plot Whisperer by Martha Alderson

I put the question to my husband, who immediately voted for The Plot Whisperer, as I've been telling him about it as I read it.  Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel (not the workbook version) is a pretty interesting deconstruction of what makes successful novels; I read that book, and then also read several of the "breakout novels" he identifies, and agreed that they were pretty compelling reads, sometimes even against my own inclination.

Who doesn't want to write a breakout novel? I picked up the workbook and opened it to the first sets of exercises to read them aloud to my husband. 

Exercise:  Adding Heroic Qualities
Step 1: Who are your personal heroes? Write down the name of one.
Step 2: What makes this person a hero or heroine to you? What is his or her greatest heroic quality? Write that down.
Step 3: What was the moment in time in which you first became aware of this quality in your hero/heroine? Write that down.
Step 4: Assign that quality to your protagonist.  Find a way for he or she actively to demonstrate that quality, even in a small way, in his or her first scene.  Make notes, starting now.  (note that there are two lines allotted for this step)
Follow-up Work: Prior to the climactic sequence of your novel, find six more points at which your protagonist can demonstrate, even in a small way, some heroic quality.

Exercise: Opening Extra Character Dimensions
Step 1: What is your protagonist's defining quality; that is, how would anyone describe your protagonist? What trait is most prominent in his personality? What kind of person is she? Write that down.
Step 2: Objectively speaking, what is the opposite of that quality? Write that down.
Step 3: Write a paragraph in which your protagonist actively demonstrates the opposite quality that you wrote down in step two.  Start writing now.
Follow-up work: Define a secondary character quality; write down its opposite; write a paragraph in which this character demonstrates the opposite secondary quality.  In the same way, open third and fourth additional dimensions to your protagonist.

I'm not totally sure I could name my personal heroes off the top of my head, or that my personal heroes are even remotely relevant to my protagonist's journey, but the entire thing sounded dry, mathematical, and arbitrary.  Jeff wanted me to toss it right out.  

I can't toss a book, but if anyone wants the workbook and the companion text (which is much better and more fully fleshed out), speak up and I'll get it to you.

For the time being, I'm going with Martha Alderson, The Plot Whisperer. The book is full of useful worksheets for planning a novel, and she has a workbook out that I might investigate as well. Since I'm in reinvention mode, I'd like to really kick my novel into gear now and ratchet up the word count on the first draft.  

If you are interested in following my progress, I'll be posting more of my fiction work at Cindy Ash, Writer.  That site is more of a journal/tracking site than a proper blog, so the only links and pictures that will be posted there will be for my own convenience, although friendly types are welcome to follow along and share encouragement, advice, and gentle suggestions.

Are you working on a big project?  What resources have you found to be laughably unhelpful?  Please share them in the comments!

The Richer Part of Simply Richer Living

  I am a huge reader.  I love a wide range of literature, depending on my mood; during this particular time of change in my home life, I'm loving non-fiction (biography and history).  When I'm calmer and feeling a lot more secure, I love more serious fiction -- Lolita baffled me, until I got to the end and everything became clear.  When things are smooth, I have the patience to make a long investment to find out why something is worth the effort.

And of course I'm a sucker for really great popular fiction, like (I'm not embarrassed to admit) Twilight or Outlander or The Partner or a great mystery/thriller/spy/horror novel.  I love that summer gives me such an excellent excuse to read beach books.

Because I'm in a time of transition and the busy-ness of the end of my kids' school year, I'm enjoying the solidness of a good biography, which is absorbing and thought-provoking, but solid and lacking any real suspense.  The one I'm reading now, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography ** by Michael Holroyd*, is exceptionally well-written, and the story of Holroyd's efforts to bring it forth is interesting in itself.  I'm really enjoying it, but since I know the broad outline of Strachey's story, I am totally OK with setting the book down to run an errand or go to bed or hang out with my kids or whatever the day requires.  Whereas, when I read Twilight, I sucked the four volumes down in one weekend while my kids watched waaaaaay too many movies and ate peanut butter & jelly sandwiches so I could prepare their meals while I read the book (I'm not kidding -- I set the book next to their plates and read while I spread the jelly).

The best exercise I've gotten in the last six months was the hour I spent pacing my own house while I read  the last few chapters of Dragonfly in Amber, the second book of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.  Seriously, I was panting by the time I had to put the book down to pick up my kindergartener, and it wasn't just because of the steamy sex scenes.

Anyway, business is beginning to wind down on this whole house sale/move business -- FINALLY -- and my mind is turning to fiction and engagement again.  So when I found this article, "Read and Comprehend (Nearly) Everything" by Nick Kolakowski, the timing was right.  And I liked it.  Apparently, the secret to understanding Dante's Inferno isn't just being a poetry-comprehension genius -- it's in shelling out the bucks (or having the patience to find for cheap or free) for a really good explanatory edition.  And then having the patience to work your way through it with the endnotes/footnotes.

I have to say, that's pretty reassuring.  It takes a lot of that whole "I didn't go to Oxford so I will never understand this stuff" out of it and just replaces it with a bit of work.  Which one is free to undertake, or not, with basically a $15-$17 investment.  Not to mention Internet access.

Kolakowski also references the Modern Library Top 100, which apparently wasn't only relevant on the eve of Y2K.  The cool thing about the Top 100 list is that it's actually several lists, including reader lists and board ("expert") lists, Radcliffe's Rival list, and a list of 100 Best Non-Fiction.  It's a nice resource to reference when you're not sure what to read next, or if you just want to create kind of a "bucket list" of reading material.  For myself, that's an impossible task, as my "to-read" list grows literally at least twenty times faster than my "read" list.

Which brings me to Goodreads.  I have kept a journal of the books I've read and had recommended to me since I was in high school, but I've abandoned them all now.  I keep track of what I've read and what I'm going to read and what I am currently reading on Goodreads.  It's like a Facebook for fellow readers.  I'm very picky with my friends list -- I have only 23 on Goodreads, compared to ten times that many on Facebook -- and that includes writers who interest me (like Jasper Fforde, who also merits his own blog entry).  I only want friends on Goodreads who are either so close that I can't ignore them (like my husband) or whose reading taste is so similar to mine that I want to know what has caught their eye -- like two friends whose permission to be mentioned I have not requested.

The point is, I recommend Goodreads as a great resource for reading and for reviews.  The reviews are a little more stringent, but more accurate, than those on Amazon, and tend to be written by people who actually read or attempted to read the book they are reviewing.  There are also opportunities to receive free books as part of Goodreads' Giveaway program, among other things.

....

Sorry, got a little distracted placing entries for the Giveaway program...

Anyway, Goodreads doesn't give me anything to plug them, either, but I love how functional and reliable it is.  If the zombie apocalypse comes along on December 21, 2012, and there's no more internet, then I'll be hurting for sure, but for now, it's a great tool and resource.  Check it out.

Kolakowski's final paragraph takes all the pressure off reading with a purpose:

Most constant readers find a balance between the complex, "deep" stuff (i.e., Nabokov, weighty biographies of famous historical figures) lightened with servings of frothy popular literature and nonfiction.

The takeaway here is:  even when life is crazy and hectic and maybe even borderline unmanageable, find a way to do the things you love in ways that fit your life as it is shaped in the moment.  There is something out there that can refresh your brain, whatever way it needs refreshing, and if you don't, then what's all the rest of it for?

Lytton Strachey,
as painted by Dora Carrington
courtesy Wikipedia

  *Lytton Strachey was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and a close friend of Virginia Woolf's.  He is famous in his own right for his excellent historical writing, especially Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria (I'm not sure this link is the best edition available but hopefully it's all right).  He was one of the first historical writers to write not just hagiography, but a full and personal biography that considered the subject from a variety of perspectives.  This is a lot more important than it sounds and would be worth spending an entire separate post on, but for now it's sufficient to say that the world would be a much stiffer place without Lytton Strachey, who is an absolutely delightful character.  If you don't have it in you to read 500 pages of great and detailed biography that includes snippets of him prowling darkened WWI London in search of handsome young men, then watch the movie Carrington, starring Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce, among others, available on Netflix Instant Queue.

** Note that I'm not remunerated by anybody at all for anything that I put on my blog at this time, I'm only sharing these links for my readers' convenience.